Johnny Reboot

I've been enjoying watching my way through Season 12 with Tessa, starting from The Ark In Space; probably the best launching-off point to introduce someone who only knows the new series to the delights of Old Who.

I don't think Season 12 is up there with the very best of the old show - it is a sad truncated thing of only 20 episodes, 4 of which are a hangover from the Pertwee era. There are a few almost unsurpassed gems of dialogue - you probably know the ones from Ark and Genesis that I mean - but the adventures themselves aren't exactly incandescently exciting. It doesn't help that each story has at least one pretty duff monster, robot or special effect liable to cause the unconverted to snigger at the shoddy production values of Seventies Who. (But what do they know?)

The real greatness of the season lies in the fact that it's such an obvious reboot of all the values of the show. After five years of UNIT family coziness, Hinchcliffe and Holmes whisk us as far away from our comfort zone as possible, into the far future and the chilly reaches of outer space. Even the TARDIS, that trusty, impenetrable sanctuary from evil, is absent for the bulk of the season. The stories are littered with dead or frozen bodies, while the living are in constant fear of torture, irradiation, or plague. It's bleak dystopian sci-fi with a vengeance, leavened only by the Doctor's cheerful faith in the indomitable spirit of mankind. And even that would start to be whittled away in seasons to come, as the Fourth Doctor's alienness was played up more and more.

A conscious effort seems to have been made to bring the show back, if not exactly to its first roots, at least to the Troughton era. Genesis remakes the Daleks in a new image, that of Davros, just as Power and Evil had repurposed the Daleks to David Whitaker's thoughtful specifications. The return of Gerry Davis writing a Cyber-story is obviously a huge clue that the Second Doctor's era was uppermost on everyone's mind and, hell, maybe we can even claim that the intervention of the Time Lords in the Doctor's affair at the start of Genesis harks back to The War Games. Certainly Holmes and Hinchcliffe must have been interested in investigating the mystery of the Doctor's people, as The Deadly Assassin was not too far in our future...

I'm excited, then, to see how Steven Moffat reboots the show for 2010. A lot of people have been "like, whatever" about the decision to brand Matt Smith's first season "Series One" instead of "Series Five", but I'm filled with excitement by that news. It implies that they won't necessarily play it safe, with more of the Russell T Davies same, but might take us off to unsuspected new dramatic territories, might place a whole new spin on the Whoniverse. It's been done before, and some very highly regarded seasons have resulted (only the forced drastic revamp of the show that was Season 24 has really earned the hatred of the fans, but Andrew Cartmel and company started hitting the mark pretty quickly after that).

I mean, really, none of us has any idea what the newborn Smith era might have in store for us. Isn't that exciting? Please, Mr Moffat, don't let us down.